Am I the only one who thinks it's kind of a scam? I've been shopping for a laptop for someone else, and pretty much everything has Vista on it. I can't see anything good about it. Let's look at the proposed benefits:

More reliable. I don't really buy it; XP/2000 is pretty relibale on it's own, and I havn't seen anything that suggests that Vista is invincible, other than Microsoft saying it is.

More security. Didn't Kaspersky and other AV companies come out and say that it's worse than XP SP2 in terms of security?

Pretty new GUI. Which uses a lot of resources. Personally I don't care much for the graphical gloss.

Direct3D 10. This just pisses me off. Way to screw over gamers. I hope someone figures out a workaround or devs start using OpenGL instead.

And the bad...

Mass consumption of resources. Not only does this hurt you in hardware costs, but especially for laptops, the power consumption just kills battery life. From what I hear, a lot of people are switching to XP because of this and the next problem...

Compatibility. I've been hearing about tons of compatibility issues with old stuff. Games especially.

So I guess I don't get it. I've never liked Microsoft's tactics, but this seems like a scam. It makes me feel like going back to 98, just on principal. I hear FAT32 blows for larger hard drives though; and XP has better built in hardware support. It's really too bad that Linux sucks so much for games (other than emulators), otherwise I'd be all over some Ubuntu.